Two bills introduced in the Florida legislature — House Bill 899 and Senate Bill 1018 — are ostensibly aimed at empowering taxpayers to object to the use of specific instructional materials in the public schools, for example on the grounds that they fail to provide "a noninflammatory, objective, and balanced viewpoint on issues." There is reason to believe that evolution and climate change are among the targets.

Writing in The Daily Beast (December 28, 2015), Zack Kopplin reviews the last decade of antievolution strategies — with the assistance of a former employee of the Discovery Institute, the de facto institutional home of "intelligent design" creationism.

The eminent pharmacologist and biochemist Alfred G. Gilman — a member of NCSE's Advisory Council — died on December 23, 2015, at the age of 74, according to The New York Times (December 24, 2015). Gilman and Martin Rodbell were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1994 for "their discovery of G-proteins and the role of these proteins in signal transduction in cells." The Times explains that their "research helped scientists understand how the body receives signals and transmits outside stimuli like light and odor, and from a variety of hormones in the body" and also increased understanding of certain types of cancer and hereditary glandular disorders.

Senate Resolution 337, introduced in the United States Senate on December 17, 2015, would, if passed, express the Senate's support of designating February 12, 2016, as Darwin Day, and its recognition of "Charles Darwin as a worthy symbol on which to celebrate the achievements of reason, science, and the advancement of human knowledge."

In a new paper (PDF; subscription required) forthcoming in Science, Nick Matzke shows that even though creationism is getting stealthier in the wake of legal defeats such as Kitzmiller v. Dover, techniques from modern evolutionary biology reveal how creationist legislation is evolving. Using data collected by NCSE and state-of-the-art phylogenetic analysis, Matzke constructed a phylogenetic tree of seventy-five distinct antievolution bills and policies, reconstructing their genealogical relationships with a high degree of confidence.